This is an actual question and not me making a statement. I have been served child and maternity content on YouTube, the ads I get on here on Reddit are about having kids or Christianity (he gets you! And I’m going to walk in front of a bus about it!) and I am a single queer person who has made it clear to my listening phone that I am not getting pregnant soon.
Are other single, intentionally child-free women being served ads about children, maternity, or related topics? It feels intentional atp and I want to know if anyone else agrees. The only content I seek out or watch on social media is decidedly NOT for anyone under the age of 18, and there’s no reason for me to be served content for children’s diapers (CHILDRENS diapers. Not adult sizes, diapers for literal babies.)
Holler if you’re experiencing this too. It’s weird and makes me feel like a baby factory, and I don’t like it.
Edit: for data purposes, I only use reddit regularly and insta solely for messaging, and I watch a lot of YouTube actual videos and do not engage with the tiktok-style format at all on YT
Comments
Yes! They know you’re of child bearing age and want you to procreate. For a long time I clicked “I’m not interested in this” on EVERYTHING and it eventually went away.
My friend, who was on the fence, got sucked into the algorithm and is now a mom.
No, but I set my gender as male on everything. I’ll take ads about boosting my testosterone and improving my sex life over ads for kids and fertility any day!!!!
I would get these all the time in my twenties and would try to throw them off by googling “abortions near me” every now and then
Constantly.
I don’t use social media other than Reddit, but all my ads on here are for strollers, egg freezing, au pairs, etc.
That or damn labubu
Yes, it’s never ending no matter how much I downvote it.
I also keep getting ads for schizophrenic medication. Which is making me feel crazy.
What’s your age bracket? I feel like I started getting these in my late 20s, also before I’d interacted with any of that kind of content (I do now cause I have a toddler). The internet is like “are you between the ages of 25 and 40 and have a vagina? Boy do I have some good shit for you!”
I think the maternity stuff just has a lot of advertising spend behind it, and they target any women in the right age range. I get a ton of it too, nevermind the fact that I don’t have a uterus.
These ads stopped for me for a while, but lately they’re popping up everywhere. YouTube even recommended gospel music and Christian lofi to me this morning, and a pampers ad. I blocked it all in anyway I could.
I’m in my forties now and they’re slowly getting replaced with ones about menopause and incontinence products. This is only when I turn my VPN off though, when it’s on all my ads think I’m a horny guy who loves crypto.
It IS the internet though. It’s not meant to be political or ethical, it’s about selling you something.
If you’d were a 12 year old boy you’d probably get super hero movies and video games.
No, but I’m nearly 7 months pregnant and get none of that, despite being in various pregnancy related subreddits and regularly googling pram and cot reviews. Sometimes the social media algorithms are just shit.
I am of the age where my ad feed is telling me about the OTC treatments and miracle cures for side effects of menopause, so I’m not the demographic.
However, on vacation, I have seen ads advertising state Public Health department’s services to support mothers and infants, which rather confused me until I realized that a 51 year old woman might be traveling to CA or WV to welcome her grandchild.
When South Park spoofed the He Gets Us ads, I recognized them and thought “I never see those anymore…thanks Reddit Premium!”
Quite the opposite. I’m a parent and get partying/clothing/travel/birth control ads.
I’m actually the target demographic for mom stuff and would be interested
I keep getting ads about donating my eggs here on reddit, but youtube thinks I’m a 12-year-old boy because I watch minecraft videos so it serves me anti-porn and pragerU ads 🫠
Literally every day. I’m sick of it! I don’t even know if I want kids!
I keep getting shitty AI ads and I haven’t bothered to read what the ad is about.
That’s ads by simple statistics of age/sex/location, nothing sinister there. Just click them away or give feedback that you’re not interested.
(I already reached the stage of cruises and anti aging cosmetics. Guess next is hearing aids.)
If you look at any you get more. Plus they throw out a lot to catch your eye. Just keep blocking and you should get less.
Once my housemate who was researching how to become a single mother by choice moved out i got a lot less. Got rid of the last of them by going into all the targeted ad settings and marking it as a sensitive topic.
Eventually I followed the instructions in this video
https://youtu.be/Es_uQAQkNXo?si=xqF_O98wS7IjsRQx
and reset then deleted my google advertising id.
I get a lot fewer ads and no more I just talked about that and now I’m getting ads for it moments.
Lifelong atheist, lifelong male. My ads are all Jesus and bras (usually old lady bras). I think maybe the ad algorithms are just not very good.
Social media and advertising algorithms are deranged. I’m a man and get served adverts for Muslim dating and charity (not a Muslim), femdom dating (not a sub), industrial lab equipment (???), and AI slop. Once I got an advert on YouTube in German for a gong hammer. I am not German and don’t own a gong.
I do all the time lately! I think it’s because my best friend became pregnant last fall and recently had her baby. I’ve been googling a few things to better understand what she’s going through and to better support her.
That’s my fault though, I can’t imagine how annoying that is with no instigation. At least I can tell myself “it’s probably because…”
I’m 31 if that matters at all
You’re valid for feeling annoyed and I wish we could redirect ads for so many reasons. Imagine if you had personal trauma surrounding children or pregnancy. egregious and disgusting
I get tons of irrelevant content, not all correlating with my gender or age. For a while the algorithm seemed to think I have eczema or some other skin condition, then that faded away.
Constantly.
It’s a shame how much money they’re wasting on trying to reach people like me when Jesus would have told them to take care of the poor.
Somehow, no. I’m on like their nerd + jesus + ozempic ad lineup, for some reason.
No, but as a 50+ yo married woman can someone please explain to me what algorithm god I offended to be bombarded with erectile dysfunction ads?
We do not need it.
I get a weird mix of pregnancy related ads with ads very clearly aimed at trans women (as in tucking underwear and facial feminization surgery ads) and ads for menopausal stuff. I’m a cis woman in my 20s that doesn’t want kids, so I think some data about me might be mixed up somewhere.
I’ll get lovely childfree content and then suddenly i get tips on how to increase my fertility. Which wouldn’t work anyways because my husbands infertile Lmao
No. Because I have ad block installed. Like a sensible person.
I keep getting wedding shit CONSTANTLY. I’m going through a divorce 😂😂 (don’t feel bad it’s legit best case scenario)
Every time I get stuff I don’t want to see, I Google shower delivery and put stuff in my cart and abandon it.
Then my ads are all pretty flowers.
All over the place. My “baby” is almost 11 now and I have zero desire to have more. Why am I getting this content?!
We all get served stuff solely based on demographics.
I’m not necessarily sure it’s a bad thing when ad buyers and sellers have less information about us and have to fall back on more basic guesses like these.
I don’t think there’s some sort of ulterior motive here. They just want the most clicks possible so they can sell more ads.
You have any friends or coworkers with kids?
Targeting often includes location tracking data and compares your interest to the interests of those you spend time with so if for example you visit a friend who has kids or vice versa you’ll get pinged as having a tangential interest in baby stuff, because someone you spend time with has that interest.
I started getting these ads in my 20s after googling doctors for a tubal ligation. Now in my 30s they’ve stopped.
I still get alot of ads for the military (or ADF here in Australia), always have. But friends and colleagues my age don’t.
Just as an aside, you can go into your reddit account settings and tell them you don’t want to see religious ads. It worked to stop those jesus “he’s gonna get you” ads for me. There are other categories you can ask not to be shown as well.
👋🏼👋🏼👋🏼
50, in full blown menopause, and getting ads about choosing the perfect pediatrician. What the ever-loving heck?!?
I block religious content or report the ads so I don’t see them because rage.
Sometimes all it takes is for you to have paused while scrolling when one of those ads happens to be on your screen. I hate it because I’ve had this sort of thing happen for no other discernible reason.
Get a VPN and clear cookies!
I keep getting a mixture of stuff for babies, botox, and weight loss pills. It’s weird, and oddly insulting because I haven’t really ever looked up anything remotely close to it.
Ever since I turned 30, all my algorithms are flooded with babies, mommy vlogs, maternity stuff… it’s honestly really annoying, I’m not interested in any of this stuff. Apparently being female and above 30 means I must be baby crazy though.
I have a baby so it figures with children, but definitely getting more pregnancy ones. Also getting crunchy mom BS popping up.
I get political stuff and drug ads, which aren’t relevant to my subs and I just assumed everyone got the same ones! I do get autoimmune ads, and I have autoimmune disease but don’t post to any autoimmune specific subs. I wonder how it chooses who sees what.
I bought some children‘s toys from Amazon for my niece and nephew ONCE 5 years ago and the internet still thinks I have a baby or am at the very least pregnant. It must have gotten wind of my actual age recently and is now also throwing in ads for anti-aging skincare products like creams for aging spots and stuff. Pick one, Google!
Yes. I have even those kind of ads turned off in Google ad settings. No help. And I don’t have tracking cookies on.
It only helped to change my gender for my Google account. First it was “prefer not to say”. Was good a few years, but then I started getting absolutely disgusting ads and content I never searched for neither do I have any wish to see. Play store kept pushing me dating and hook up apps despite me being ace and never searching such content.
Finally I changed my account gender to male. And wow, all those ads are gone. No more maternity shit, no more porn shit either. I wonder how much it will last.
Is it your age, most likely? When I had social media accounts besides this one, I had my age listed as 60 years older than I was. I was getting denture ads throughout my 20s.
Gotta throw off the algorithm with other searches or tey to keep your history clean as possible. Although I have my history turned off for YT and get so many ED ads for men. oof.
I get this kid of stuff all the time. It’s been happening on and off for years. I’ve even gone so far as to hide ads and label them as “doesn’t apply to me.” I still get them.
Do you spend time with people who are pregnant or raising small children? I’ve found that when I meet up with certain friends, my ads start to reflect their interests. I once got inundated with ads for dating sites after getting dinner with a newly single friend who was spending a lot of time on Tinder.
If it bothers you, you could always take a few minutes to really mess with the algorithm. Start “shopping” online for weird stuff. Pick an obscure hobby, find a website that sells supplies, put a bunch of items in your cart and abandon it. Fill your feed with ads for leatherworking, mushroom growing, soapmaking, and taxidermy.
Alternately, visit one single website that sells guns and ammunition and spend the next week scrolling past right-wing propaganda and invitations to join actual militias. That’s what I got for wondering how much money a large ammo hoard the police had seized might actually cost. I’m not sure if it’d be less irritating, but at least you’d have the satisfaction of knowing a tiny fraction of those advertising budgets were being utterly wasted (unless you’re into that sort of thing).
It took me a minute to remember but, yes! In my 20s and early 30s before I had my baby I was getting ads for baby stuff. I remember getting a push notification from the Target app for a sale on an ENORMOUS size pack of diapers and I was like “truly what in the fuck”. And I was never looking at baby or pregnancy stuff. I had a baby now though so 🤷🏻♀️
I get constant reels about babies on Facebook. I try to train the algorithm by hiding them but it never ends. I like babies but it’s a lot
I feel like as soon as you have any period related searches, they will serve you pregnancy ads.
Or ovary questions, just anything related to having a uterus.
Yep, because I’m a female in my 20s, and recently bought a house and got married. Those demographics usually also mean starting a family. The fucked up part? We’ve been struggling with infertility for half a decade and the baby ads regularly reduce me to tears.
Yes, as a woman, yes. They want you to get married and have children, as a woman I was bombarded with it.
So fucking disgusting.
Then I ended all my social media.
I’m now looking for a social media that doesn’t bombard women with patriarchal shit advertising.
Alllllll the time. Half of my TikTok feed is “my pregnancy journey! Life with a new born! Finding out I’m pregnant with my 45th child!” I’m CFBC and do not engage in any of this content, but yet it’s still there.
Something suspicious I noticed a while ago: when I would put in that I started my period on my tracker app, I would get “period relief” type videos on TikTok, and then when it would show I’m ovulating, I’d get more pregnancy/baby type videos. Yeah deleted that shit real quick
All the time and as a childfree woman, it gets so old. I wish I could do more to help throw the algorithm off because it irritates me, especially when I know they want procreation to help keep the worker class strong for all these damn billionaires.
ETA also the jokes on them because I’m sterilized LMAO
Luckily now that I’m 42 I don’t get anything baby related
When I was 16 I started getting samples for baby stuff and wedding magazines in the mail. My parents and I never figured out why.
I’m 35 so mine have changed to ads about freezing my eggs lmao
I have 71 child/parenting related tags blocked on TikTok and it still thinks I’m pregnant or trying to get pregnant. There’s been a big shift since the whole TikTok ban issues started. I get waves of ads on other sites too. The birth rate is down, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is an incentive to push baby related ads.
My ad algorithm has no fucking clue who I am, and I’m thrilled.
I do get all the Jesus bullshit, and I’m assuming it’s due to my atheist call in shows and secular bible study, but I’m fine with the church throwing away money on ad revenue just for my heathen ass.
I get a lot of ads for manscapers and sometimes nipple creams for breast feeding. At least the one with the bacteria that’ll give you big balls stopped.
Ugh for a while I was constantly getting ads on Facebook for that stuff. Whenever I’d click to hide it, there was always a little thing that said “why am I seeing this ad?” & went I went to see, it was simply because I’m female & within their target age range over 18. Infuriating!! I had to deep dive into my ad settings & mark that I wasn’t interested in ads pertaining to children, pregnancy, fertility, etc.
Yeah
I hate it. Especially the “he gets us” bullshit you can’t even block.
Weirdly, I once got bombarded with an avalanche of baby ads after a week of binging old Jackass episodes. I think the algorithm just predicts your age, and that’s it.
I get ads for lesbian travel agencies and child free stuff. I’m a straight married mom 🤷🏻♀️
While the marketers will tell us all that AI will take over the world you are exposing a weakness of AI. It tends to be very bias and follow norms.
You can tell a person that you have no interest in having kids anytime soon and reasonable people will respect that. They will respect that no matter what content you consume or produce.
For AI that is just not possible. You are lumped into a category of people that interact with such content and are served ads based on that content. It just is not smart enough to differentiate you as a person with unique thoughts and feelings.
Only on YouTube, but I also get ads in Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Norwegan, German, etc, languages that I don’t speak of countries I’ve never been to. I refuse to fill out the surveys YouTube sometimes serves before a video, so I think that has something to do with it. But 99% of the content I watch is in English and 1% is in Spanish, so I don’t know why, and it happens to my sister too.
I’m a man and I get diaper and early child learning ads too, I think it might be more targeted for age over gender as my parents don’t get these ads
Try clearing all cookies on your devices. You may have to log in again to some, but that should get rid of most of the unwanted ads.
Google your browser name and clear cookies for a step by step process. It’s good digital hygiene anyway.
I’m getting nonstop ads about how various forms of birth control will kill you. Stroke, coma, all normal stuff in the day of a birth control user, apparently. Would I like to be included in the lawsuit?
Yes and I get the junk mail too from gerber lol
This happened to me from my 20s – 30s. It’s just dumb algorithms doing their thing.
I regularly bork my algorithm by closing or reporting sexist ads as “misleading” or “bullying” or similar. I never click on ads or upvote them. If I’m interested in a product, I’ll look it up on my work computer bc it’s security blocks as much social media, trackers, auto-erases cookies, etc. as possible. I also regularly erase my cookies and web history. Private browsing is a godsend.
As a result, I get the most random ads online. Everything from elder care products (eg adult diapers) to FB fan groups for “historical trains of southeast England”. It’s entertaining to see the algorithms struggle. When they start to hone back in on my demographic (eg books for parents of teens), I bork the system again.
My childfree friends have mentioned this. I do have a toddler and I’ve noticed more tradwife and antivaxx stuff.
Yup, until I hit 40 and now it’s all perimenopause shit. That doesn’t apply to me either (yet) so I just kind of chuckle to myself at their wasted marketing dollars. 🤷🏻♀️
I get a ton of those ads because algorithms have clocked me as a woman of a certain age. I’m going to guess most of us over 20 get hit with child-related ads.
I’m not childfree, but I’m doing fertility stuff and my algorithm is currently all stillbirth content. Which is… just fantastic.
I looked up baby onesies online to buy for my best friend that just had her first baby. A majority of my ads are baby/maternity related now even though I only visited ONE website. I even have personalized ads turned off for all of my social media, and I still get this shit.
I’m just so sick of seeing ads everywhere as is, but it’s beyond creepy that they are keeping track of my habits to that extent.
Also, if you have a smart phone anything talked about around OR EVEN TEXTED on your phone, searched, looked at for more than two seconds, it all gets aggregated into the algorithm that’s trying to extract money from your bank account. It really is that bad.
Not often at all. I get ads for testosterone, hair loss, and ED. However, there were a few weeks I was mentioning the gifts I need to get for my niece, nephew, and little cousins and I started getting this same amazon ad on my phone/home tv. It was for a kids party and how everything you need is just a click away. Although I was irritated at the invasive shit, I was more disturbed at the track they used for the commercial; an instrumental of Shimmy Shimmy Ya by ODB. I could hear the lyrics in my head and I couldn’t tell if honest mistake or tongue and cheek
Yes. And ads too. One more diaper ad and I’m breaking the TV.
I swear two things about ads. One, our devices listen to us. And two, every woman is advertised this shit despite our interest in it.
I call my cats my babies. The industrial complex must think they’re human.
I don’t know if it’s your algorithm but I keep getting ads about water softeners from Culligan and we installed one of those half a year ago
For a few weeks recently I kept getting Facebook posts and videos about babies from people I’ve never met. Like “look how precious our new baby is!” kind of stuff. It was really weird.
Yes. It doesn’t matter. I am widowed and well past the age to procreate and they know it as evidenced by all the grief/widow-dating and elder-junk they push at me too. But, hey, we are women. We might know other women! And might mention those ads to those women! 🙄
The only people who don’t get maturity shit for ads are men.
ETA: Lol, great typo for “maternity.”
I do as much ad blocking as I can, so I only have to deal with ads at work and on Twitch streams. Which are at least pretty generic.
DNS ad blocking will cover your whole house (you can pull this off while out and about, but it’s harder), however Firefox mobile + web browser + ad block on phone will cover 90% of your ads, various 3rd party youtube apps exist for ad blocking if you don’t want to use the web browser option.
Not a ton of maternity ones, but I’m in my 30s so probably too old for that and not American. Mostly food ordering, whatever I looked at recently online, so much fucking gambling and temu ads, and various offensive and American-focused ones if I dare be on Reddit or Youtube without it. Like conspiracy theory and political ones.
I’m 33 with no kids and I get ads for fertility treatment centers. I’m very happily childfree by choice and nothing will change that decision.
yep n it slap n the face for those us who can NOT have childen of our own;;
No but I’m old
This is a good thing! It means they don’t know things about you! You should click on some of those ads to encourage them further
I sure do! And sometimes if it’s a certain time of month it does a good job at propagandizing me into being like “aw that’s cute, if I had a baby I bet I’d dress it in cute… wait, snap out of it”
And other times of the month I see it and I’m like “piss off, uggo baby”
I’m getting ads saying I should “donate” (sell) my eggs bruh
I GET THE DIAPERS ADS TOO, only on YouTube though. I’m so glad I’m not the only one. It started I think about a year ago or so. I’m a single 26 year old so obviously i’m not pregnant and don’t ever plan to be. There’s that paranoid part of my brain that makes me wonder if it’s intentional that they keep giving me these ads. Like they are somehow trying to change my mind? Idk.
There was a while last year where Instagram was pushing “motherhood is so wonderful but here is my traumatic birth story” and “also you should unschool because formal education is the devil” content on me and I HATED it. I would occasionally look at childfree content so I guess Instagram decided that meant I wanted to hear about babies and pregnancy all the time. It took days of tapping “not interested in this content” and blocking keywords surrounding pregnancy before my feed finally chilled out.
Only because I search for boy/girl name ideas for my Sims 2 children.
No, because I’ve restricted those ad categories on Reddit. Here are instructions for how to do so on mobile:
Tap profile icon
Tap settings
Account settings under general
Scroll down to the bottom, you can limit “sensitive advertising categories”, which includes religion and pregnancy and parenting.
I’ve been getting them a lot more recently and it’s frustrating because I’ve struggled with infertility and only in the past two years have we decided to stop trying and be happy with our child free life. So seeing this material has been slightly triggering.
EnRAGEment is engagement. Giving you content you react negatively to is getting a reaction. We have reached the point of needing to gray-rock inanimate algorithms.
My insta was on the fence whether I have kids or not, so I got the occasional ad for it, but when I bought some gifts for my niece it was like the dam broke and now its everywhere 😅
I consistently get content from nurses in obstetrics, parents of small children, and ads for subtly Christian shit on TikTok these days. I don’t mind the content bc it’s mostly reaffirming my choice to be child free and the ads are fucking insidious but they’re marked as marketing so not the worst to ignore.
My biggest pet peeve from the ads is one for a “k-12 homeschooling method” which is run by an overly Christian (evangelical and problematic AF) group because they’re actively campaigning to defund public education in favor of their PAID service. The best ones are the ads from some American company trying to sell me “holy water blessed by the pope”. I got, like, one or two of those a day the week jd Vance killed the last pope.
I look up witchy related stuff and the algorithm goes crazy. It’s Halloween all the time and it’s not gender specific.
Posts like these may actually make the ads worse. You can fiddle around with ad preferences too. When my ex-husband was losing his battle with heroin, I would make posts about addiction here. Then he died 3 years ago so I didn’t do that anymore. But now 4 years later, I still get ads for treatment centers and suboxone.
I don’t think it’s the companies thinking you are a baby factory. They want their ads to go to prospective mothers, who might actually buy their stuff, instead of people that don’t.
Also, are you logged into YouTube or do you use it without logging in? Logging in helps with the algorithm, it won’t be as random.
This happens because of location sharing and cookies. You’ve probably been around moms who have searched or browsed for content related to children or pregnancy. The cookies see you’re in the same location. Boom, you get ads for that.
Yes, but also weirdly lots of ads about meds to stop male pattern baldness 😅the ad data must be doing shotgun approach lol
The song baby, by Panic Shack knows the feeling
I see almost no ads online, thanks to aggressive and blockers and Pi-Hole.
See also /r/privacy for ways to mess with the algorithms.
Nope, I am currently getting luxury vacation type ads
Part of the billionaire misogyny show that walked into town several years ago.
I don’t get those, but I am middle aged. I did used to get weight loss crap despite being healthy weight and never showing any interest in weight loss. Now the main thing I get is pet related ads. I love it actually. I don’t have any pets, nor any desire to get any in the future (travel too much), so I enjoy the free cute puppy content and know that their marketing spend is having zero effect.
Not at all, huh
You can turn some of the targeted ads off in Reddit settings (and for other apps, I’d presume)
I was getting ads about egg donation. No one would ever want my eggs. I don’t want them and am probably getting a hysterectomy this year!
I also got the Jesus ads for a while. It drove me nuts and was a waste of the advertiser’s money.
Just a ton of bs He Gets Us ads. Must be bc I’m in r/atheism
No, not at all, actually.
I filtered out sensitive ad topics in reddit settings. Idk what all they are, but i haven’t seen any of these. I’ve gotten tons for pets, jewelry, fashion, and mental illnesses (i did not filter this out bc it entertains me). I’ve gotten some for ED, but I talk about having one and it does not bother me to see ads for trials.
I may after commenting on this post though!
I’ve been seeing an increase in anti-birth control ads and other content.
I had to go into my Google account to disable that kinda shit under personalized ad settings or something. Once on a brand account that was automatically flagged as male and can’t be changed, again more recently on a newer one that I set to female.